~ overflow ~

Problem:

Configuring my old school CanoScan N640P on linux.

Solution:

Install sane pack.

Edit /etc/sane.d/dll.conf, comment everything but canon_pp

Edit /etc/sane.d/canon_pp.conf, uncomment force-nibble

use xsane or scanimage (CLI) to scan your stuff!

Full Story:

There’s 2 options, with SANE or using this old project.

With sane it’s easier, you just need to make sure you uncomment the canon_pp from your /etc/sane.d/dll.conf

the documentation is a bit obscure and errors as well, specially when you’re doing this on CLI.

After uncommenting the dll.conf (canon_pp) you can open xsane, and then it will detect the scanner correctly.

For me, xsane worked better than the sane-find-scanner, wich, even with the -p switch never detected anything.

There’s another way to detect it on the command line, by scanimage -L, wich will list the detected scanners using a different method, you can also do the whole scan process using scanimage, not good as xscan but an alternate.

xsane was able to calibrate my scanner, however, when i tried to scan i got a kernel fail, not sure if this scanner is too old or it’s something with the LPT buffer, after the kernel crash scanner stopped working correctly, it only scans a part of the image, apparently until the LPT buffer is full, but data never reaches the computer, scanner gets stuck in the middle of it’s job waiting for the machine return (apparently :P). Scanimage has an option to change the LPT buffer, i tried it out by scanimage -T -B -p -v, but nothing it still getting stuck in the middle.

After some more research i figured out that uncomenting force-nibble at canon_pp.conf did the work.

Sources:

Ubuntu Forums

Linux Certif

derkeiler.com